If ever asked to compile a list of my favorite people in world history, I would have to place this man near the top. He is the reason Christians become druids at Christmas and drag evergreen trees into their homes, and become fertility priests at Easter and paint eggs -- marvelous incongruities so ingrained in the Western mind (and so essential to the national economy) that they no longer seem odd at all.

Such strangeness comes from the doctrine of "accommodation," Pope Gregory's official instruction to Bishop Augustine regarding the conversion of pagans in AD 601. By redefining pagan traditions by couching them in Christian terms, church officials permitted the Carnival impulses of the converts and hoped that the transplanted imagery would take hold and, in some abracadabrian feat, transform the former into the latter.

Despite centuries of religious and social reformation which lambasted Catholic spectacles as continuations of earlier bad habits, the residue of paganism sticks -- and makes culture that much more interesting.